Workshop: A New World Order? Internationalism and Legal Imagination in Inter-War Europe

On December 17, 2015, the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki Faculty of Law will host a workshop on "A New World Order? Internationalism and Legal Imagination in Inter-War Europe." The program is here. Here's the idea:

The cataclysm of the Great War, the birth of democratic nation-states upon the ruins of monarchic empires, and efforts to found the League of Nations challenged contemporary legal theorists to restate, re-frame – or indeed to found anew – the principles of European internationalism. The urgent agendas of this extraordinarily intense period of legal innovation included attempts to think beyond unlimited state sovereignty, articulations of the legal and institutional tools for an organized system of internationalism, and reformulations of natural law or positivism to support these efforts. The seminar explores the transformations and innovations in the political and legal discourses of the time, as well as their embeddedness in the substantive and methodological frameworks of the tradition. A particular focus is on mapping the state of art in the inter-war history of European legal thought, including possibilities for a trans-national approach, and on its echoes in our own times.